Meet the Major Programmes team
Doug Ring
Doug joined Deloitte nearly 6 years ago as an experienced hire, but his passion for projects with social impact developed over a number of years in the workplace.
“I was a mid-level civil servant when I got my first project to manage at the start of my career. I was given $10m budget to hedge options risk an exchange rate portfolio. I had no formal project training or experience so I was improvising!
After several months of planning, in one exciting morning we spent $10m on the options market. I thought to myself ‘that was fun – I think I could make a career of this!’ 20 years later, here I am at Deloitte with (hopefully) a little more idea what I’m doing!”
Subsequent projects that Doug managed in the civil service did not hit the same heights and were often met with resistance to change and red tape. Frustrated with the pace of change, Doug left and took a role as a project manager working for a UK police force but soon worked his way up to Head of Portfolio Management.
“I was taken out of my portfolio management role and asked to lead a programme to restructure the force’s operational structure...
We delivered £10m savings, which at the time was enough to put 200 additional officers on the front-line. What was great about the programme was that the recruitment and deployment of the new officers was in the scope of the programme so we saw the change right through to benefit realisation. That was the first time I saw the immediate and very direct impact that a programme could have on public safety and crime. It was a game-changer!”
“I’m focused on Security and Justice because, for me, that’s the sector that has the greatest opportunities to deliver projects that have a direct societal impact."
At the end of the Programme Doug left as he was keen to move his career on. He set himself up as a contract programme manager and a few years later came the job offer from Deloitte.
“I got the job offer from Deloitte which presented a major life-crossroad: stick to our plan and be a stay-at-home dad for 12 months staying in our one-bedroom flat, or take the job offer from Deloitte and be able to buy a house with more space. It was a difficult decision as I was mentally prepared for 12-months of parenting but, in the end, it was the right choice for us as a family and for my career.”
When he started at Deloitte, Doug felt an obvious alignment to the S&J account: “I delivered a fantastic project with a Police client which rekindled my affection for portfolio management, but it wasn’t until the National Testing Programme that I got back into a project with immediate social impact.
I was managing the Programme Office for the National Testing Programme. It was hard work, but very rewarding to be part of the machine that delivered the testing capacity improvements you would hear about on the news each day. On the side I ran a project to improve testing turnaround times – the idea was that: the sooner you returned a positive result, the sooner that individual could isolate and prevent transmission. We made a number of changes to the testing journey that made a significant improvement and I’m proud to think about the number of onward transmissions that may have been prevented as a result.”
Now Doug is passionate about working on projects that have real social impact.
“I focus on clients in the Security and Justice sector because, for me, they represent the greatest opportunities to deliver projects that have a direct societal impact. I’m excited to embark on a new multi-year programme to improve capabilities across all police forces in digital evidence. At the heart of this is the fact that successful judicial outcomes for victims of rape and serious sexual offences are around 1.5 to 2%. The ability of police forces to exploit digital evidence is seen is a critical enabler to improving those outcomes.
”It’s clear that Doug is extremely proud to work on such exciting projects, that he might never have got the chance to work on had he not made the jump to Deloitte.
Doug is looking forward to further opportunities to deliver on the UK’s Security and Justice priorities.
“We are also looking forward to an exciting opportunity to support the Electronic Monitoring programme. This is another interesting programme with genuine social impact at the heart of it. Around 40% of offenders reoffend within 12 months of their release and end up back in prison.”
